Based on Real Events is an exhibition of works from the museum's collection, a display of ideas about our world reflected in ARTIUM, which has been under construction for more than 30 years and is now home to works imbued with memory that allow us to organise—in this project and in each of us as individuals—more or less coherent discourses concerning our contemporary circumstances.
The exhibition is an account that shifts between reality and fiction that is, as its title suggests, based on a true story. Or... or perhaps not. The terms reality and truth slip from our grasp.
This project deals with the many faces of our reality and with the need for narration, the use of the document, fiction, stories and all those other strategies that enable us to give shape to and explain our context. A reality that we do not need to uncover or capture so much as to envision and make possible.
At a time when the vast leisure and audio-visual industries are infiltrating into every corner, and the great religions and ideologies have lost their power to create symbolic content, art retains its impetus towards narration, following different strategies that allow us to keep dreaming, exorcising, interpreting and adding detail to the structures of the day-to-day reality we cling to.
The space has been divided into eight linked episodes containing 90 works that weave narrative strategies, thematic interests and the history of the collection itself. The exhibition begins with a small artist's sketchbook. The drawings in it, liberated from the pages that contain them, will travel alongside us as we make our way through the exhibition, like someone devising his own journey.
Languages and strategies based on fantasy, the story and the plot, which enable us to imagine parallel worlds, are interlaced. We will meet the artist as a story-teller, as a wise man and the narrator of myths and legends, someone who is far from being self-complacent. We will remember myth as a tool that articulates countless narratives. We will see dystopia as the image of disillusionment with the fantasies and utopian projects of the past in our present. The dark side is scratched, the dark side in which fear of reality is revealed by means of strategies such as humour, masks and cheek. The spectator's attention is stirred as he is drawn to question the impressions of his senses. Coincidences between fiction and reality are sought by considering once again the influence of our sensorial experience on our concept of reality. Lastly, works are featured that revise the modern discourse, that use strategies that cast doubt on the current system and propose transgressive political and aesthetic stances and the reclaiming of technology in our everyday lives through play and inventiveness, all under the banner of the discourse of do-it-yourself.

ARTIUM Collection. Based on real events

South Gallery, from October 1, 2010 to September 4, 2011
Based on real events is a production of ARTIUM (Vitoria-Gasteiz)
Activities: Lecture: Based on real events, by Enrique Martínez Goikoetxea (curator of the exhibition). Tuesday, October 26, 8 PM.